Systems Thinking and Design Thinking: The Search for Principles in the World We Are Making
Summer 2019
While the concept of system has been part of design theory and practice from the beginning of the discipline, there is renewed interest today in the relationship of systems thinking and design. After...
Co-shaping the Future in Quadruple Helix Innovation Systems: Uncovering Public Preferences toward Participatory Research and Innovation
Summer 2019
The Quadruple Helix Model of innovation recognizes four major actors in the innovation system: science, policy, industry, and society. In keeping with this model, more and more governments are prioritizing...
Wicked Problems: Flexible Characterizations and Visual Representations
Spring 2025
The term “wicked problem” is used to describe a wide range of challenges that defy definition or resolution. These descriptions often reference Rittel and Webber’s 1973 publication, repeatedly listing...
Changing Design Education for the 21st Century
Spring 2020
Designers are entrusted with increasingly complex and impactful challenges. However, the current system of design education does not always prepare students for these challenges. When we examine what...
Harmony in Design: A Synthesis of Literature from Classical Philosophy, the Sciences, Economics, and Design
Spring 2022
Classical theories of harmony have been used to explain phenomena like beauty, happiness, health, virtue, pleasure, peace, and even ecological sustainability. With the intent of making these theories...
Systemic Design Principles in Social Innovation: A Study of Expert Practices and Design Rationales
Autumn 2020
In recent decades, design has expanded from a practice aimed at designing things to one that helps to address complex societal challenges. In this context, a field of practice called systemic design...
Posthumanism and Design
Spring 2017
Since at least the mid-1980s, design has been dominated by a human-centered and user-centered paradigm. Currently, the implications of technological and environmental transformations are challenging...
Decolonizing Public Healthcare Systems: Designing with Indigenous Peoples
Winter 2022
Indigenous peoples around the world are being failed by current public health systems. This is directly linked to the ongoing issue of colonialism. We need to decolonize health systems if we want to...
Foresight and Design: New Support for Strategic Decision Making
Autumn 2020
Decision makers who plan, decide, and act to influence change need to rely on a new, emerging approach to the future in the increasingly turbulent environments they face today. After reviewing the evidence...
Design Anthropology and Ontological Future Making: Transformative Action for the Emergence of Shared Futures
Winter 2025
This article presents a novel approach—Ontological Future Making—that prioritizes transformative action. Rather than considering distant possibilities and consequences of futures, this approach engages...
Making Imagined Futures through Design: The Interplay between Discourse and Materiality
Winter 2025
Addressing futures uncertainty requires collective effort to imagine and make futures that are more desirable to organizations and societies. This article investigates how design artifacts can support...
Frame Creation and Design in the Expanded Field
Autumn 2015
Design-trained people have access to a very broad range of professions. Yet there is something paradoxical about this development: ostensibly, many of these highly successful people have moved out of...
Interaction, Integration, Interconnectivity, and Iteration: A New Model for Designing Infrastructure Change
Winter 2022
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the obsolescence of the infrastructures we rely on in our everyday lives. Since the Industrial Revolution, design and public health have taken parallel...
Pluriversal Futures for Design Education
Summer 2023
The Future of Design Education working group on pluriversal design—with members from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, South and Southeastern Asia, North America, Oceania, and Europe—developed recommendations...
The Future End of Design Work: A Critical Overview of Managerialism, Generative AI, and the Nature of Knowledge Work, and Why Craft Remains Relevant
Winter 2024
This article examines the transformation of design work under the influence of managerialism and the rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Drawing on John Maynard Keynes’s projections...
DesignX: Complex Sociotechnical Systems
Winter 2015
This paper is a follow up to DesignX, a position paper written in 2014, which introduced the design challenges of complex sociotechnical systems such as healthcare, transportation, governmental policy,...
“Back to the Future”: Making the Future Organizational Space from Experience to Imagination and Back
Winter 2025
This article explores how the experience of organizational space shapes the enactment of imagined futures of work. While research on future-making emphasizes the value of imagining multiple distant...
Redirective Tactics for Designing Transitions: A Typology of Sustainable Future-Making Pathways
Winter 2025
Against the backdrop of a global socio-ecological crisis, transition design seeks to envision and realize more desirable future worlds. Framing transition design as a redirective practice, this article...
Scaffolding Futures Making: Facilitating a More Democratizing Futuring Practice
Winter 2025
In this article, we develop a conceptual framework for democratizing futures making, a practice often dominated by corporate and professional elites. We argue that more inclusive participation requires...
Revisiting “Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science?”—The Question of Quality in Communication Design
Summer 2022
In 1988, I published an article on the criteria for quality in communication design. This article revisits the issues I raised: performance, rather than style, should be the determining factor in assessing...
Resensing Visions: A Convivial Approach to Future-Making from a Global South Context in Hermosillo, Mexico
Winter 2025
Visioning—the act of imagining futures—plays a crucial role in design, projecting possibilities, desires, and intentional directions into the future. Yet visioning methods face significant limitations,...
Speculative Design as Thought Experiment
Autumn 2021
Speculative design is a subsidiary field of critical design practice. It generally involves developing scenarios based on a central object, often a prototype. Because it is concerned with alternative...